The Family Archives and the Only Copy in My Counter

Today, an entrepreneur from Westmount came into my little shop.

He came for something very ordinary, at least on the surface.

He had a collection of family documents that needed to be scanned—old newspapers, identification documents, photographs, and other pieces of family history. Some of them looked almost like pages from a family genealogy.

As I worked with the documents, I began to realize that he and I had something in common.

We are about the same age.

He graduated from university in the 1990s, and his university was the University of Waterloo. I found myself thinking that there was something familiar about him—not because our lives were the same, but because he seemed to belong to the same generation of people who grew up watching technology change from something specialized into something that quietly entered almost every part of ordinary life.

And somehow, he reminded me a little of Joe.

Joe is one of the characters in my novel, Nonimportantech.

Joe is not the kind of character who needs to stand at the center of every scene. He is practical. He understands how things work. When there is a problem involving property, logistics, coordination, or simply getting something done, Joe tends to become useful very quickly.

The man who walked into my shop today had something of that feeling.

Perhaps it was the combination of his generation, his technical university background, his experience as an entrepreneur, and the way he approached the family documents he had brought with him.

There was also something almost amusing about the situation.

He had come to preserve his family's past.

And I happened to have written a novel about people trying to build a future while carrying an enormous amount of human history with them.

At some point, our conversation moved toward the book.

He became interested in Nonimportantech.

I looked at the glass cabinet.

There was only one English copy left.

So I took it out and gave it to him.

I didn't really think of it as a sale.

It felt more like a continuation of the conversation.

He had brought his family's newspapers, photographs, documents, and memories into my shop so that I could help preserve them digitally.

And I gave him a book that, in its own strange way, is also about families, memory, belonging, and the systems people build around their lives.

That coincidence stayed with me.

My shop is usually a place where people bring things from the past.

Photographs.

Old documents.

Family papers.

Tapes.

Paintings.

Sometimes things that have been sitting in a drawer or a basement for decades.

People come in because they don't want those things to disappear.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, a book comes out of the glass cabinet and joins someone else's collection of memories.

The interesting thing is that I never know where a book will eventually go.

I can put it on a shelf.

I can put it in a glass cabinet.

I can put it on Amazon.

But I cannot really decide who will connect with it.

Today, one copy found its way to a man who had just spent part of his day looking through his own family's history.

That seemed like a good place for it.

Perhaps this is another reason I continue to keep the book in my shop.

A book is not only something to sell.

Sometimes it is simply another object waiting for the right person to recognize something in it.